Margaret Bird – Inculcating an appreciation of time pressure in the young: the training of children for working life in 18th-century EnglandPodcast at Backdoor broadcasting

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History
Departmental Research seminars 2014/2015
24 March 2015

The rearing of children has been a topic at the centre of academic debate since the Annales historian Philippe Ariès analysed le sentiment de l’enfance in 1960.
Margaret Bird’s exploration of the tensions between respecting children as individuals and the need to hurry them into maturity for working life relates to the mercantile and manufacturing class in England. Understanding time pressure, as in expecting six-year-olds to watch the clock, formed part of their moulding as useful members of society. Time-conscious capitalism and Calvinism lay behind much of the thinking. It draws in part on the newly published diary of Mary Hardy, wife of a farmer and manufacturer.

Michel Foucault’s conception of “power-knowledge” has been one of the most influential political ideas to have arisen in recent decades. It reverses the age-old assumption that knowledge will set us free. Instead, it suggests that knowledge is more closely related to social control than it is to freedom. Foucault’s rethinking of the relationship between power and knowledge was not a purely theoretical discovery. Instead it derives from his concerted political involvement with the Prison Information Group (GIP) – an innovative group of renegade French Maoists active during the early 1970s. Richard Wolin (History, The Graduate Center, CUNY) will discuss this hitherto underresearched episode of Foucault’s past as a political activist.

Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade is the only scientific research institutions in Serbia which deals with research in the field of philosophy and social theory in a systematic and long-term way. As part of its scientific activities, the Institute combines fundamental philosophical research with a multi-disciplinary (sociology, political science, legal, anthropological) study of the society problems.

The Center for Ethics, Law and Applied Philosophy (CELAP) is a think-tank based in Belgrade, Serbia. CELAP’s founders are philosophers, lawyers, political scientists and anthropologists, but also architects and urban theoreticians.

http://www.egs.edu/ Thomas Zummer, artist and independent scholar, giving a talk on the apparatus in Foucault and Agamben, the phantasma and the sublime. In the final section of the clip, Leslie Thornton’s film “A philosopher’s walk on the sublime” is shown. Theorists discussed include Foucault, Nietzsche, Agamben, Heidegger, Sophocles, Jean-Luc Nancy and others. The talk essentially presents a complex meditation on the philosophical concepts of dispositif/apparatus, withdrawal, violence, the sublime, the phantasm and the aporias of communication. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2014 Thomas Zummer and Leslie Thornton.

Thomas Zummer is an artist and lecturer at the Tyler School of Art and a visiting professor in critical studies in the Transmedia Programme at the Hogeschool Sint Lukas, Brussels, as well as visiting professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. Thomas Zummer is an internationally aclaimed independent scholar and writer, as well as being an artist and curator. As an artist he has exhibited internationally since 1976, including at Exit Art, Thread Waxing Space, and The Dia Foundation in New York City as well as at the CAPC in Bordeaux and Wigmore Hall in London. With his wife, they have had a long collaboration as well with The Wooster Group, acting in many of their performances. Most recently, Zummer was artist in residence at the haudenschildGarage in La Jolla, California. In 1995 Thomas Zummer won 5th Prize in the ACA/CODA Architectural Design Competition for the City of Atlanta for the 1996 Olympics.

Education has played an essential role in the development of Thomas Zummer as both an artist and writer. His academic career began in Michigan where his undergraduate studies at Delta College and University of Michigan. Zummer’s undergraduate studies focused on paleozoology, philosophy and cinema. In 1974 Thomas moved to Hartford, Connecticut. Thomas Zummer obtained his BFA in 1976, focusing on Aesthetics and Cinema Studies at the Hartford Art School / University of Hartford. Thomas Zummer participated as a panelist and attended seminars at the Center for 20th Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee room 1979-82. From 1980-81 Thomas was at the New School for Social Research where he was a graduate faculty and studied philosophy. In 1982 Thomas Zummer began his studies with Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida at Yale University in the Comparative Literature department. Thomas Zummer then worked as a research assistant to Michel Foucault. at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1981-86 Zummer studied with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Umbert Eco, Paul Ricoeur and John Searle at the University of Toronto, Institute for Semiotics and Structural Studies. From 1991-92 Zummer studied Arabic Languages at The New School for Social Research.

Taking his point of departure in Foucault’s work from the mid to late 1970s, Professor de Beistegui will argue that the lecture courses and books from that period lay the ground for a genealogy of the western subject as a subject of desire. Beyond Foucault’s own genealogy, he’ll ask about the connections and tensions between the rationalities of the sexual instinct and economic interest , and suggest that they require a third rationality, and a third sense of desire, which involves the Law and the symbolic order, the significance of which Foucault recognizes, but doesn’t explore.

Gil Anidjar, professor in the Departments of Religion and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) and core ICLS faculty member, will be the respondent.

Miguel de Beistegui was educated in France (BA, MA in Philosophy at the Sorbonne), the US (Ph.D., Loyola University of Chicago), and Germany (Postdoc, Hegel-Archiv, Bochum). He specializes in 20th century German and French philosophy, and has published books and articles in the following areas: ontology, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics and politics. Initially specializing in the thought of Martin Heidegger, and in phenomenology in general, he has become convinced that philosophy needs to resist extreme specialization and develop the conceptual tools to engage with our time, not only bringing together the various branches of philosophy, but also establishing a dialogue between philosophy and the other disciplines, in the social as well as the natural sciences. His publications include Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology (2004), The New Heidegger (2005), Immanence and Philosophy: Deleuze (2010), Proust as Philosopher: the Art of Metaphor (2012), and Aesthetics After Metaphysics: From Mimesis to Metaphor (2012). He is also the co-editor of the forthcoming The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics.